Program Notes

We begin with an analysis of the Trump Administration’s tax overhaul plan from the former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation Edward Kleinbard. Now a Professor of Law at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, he joins us to discuss his article at Vox.com “The GOP says its business plan will help workers and small business. It won’t”,and the cynical way Republicans are trying to sell this latest giveaway to the 1% or the 1% claiming it will help the middle class and working Americans. And while this so-called “tax reform” is clearly a gift to the donor class by the Republicans, these lackeys of the plutocrats are counting on satisfying their political masters by conning their voters into believing they are getting the government off their back when in fact Trump and the Congress are making ordinary Americans shoulder more of the tax burden so that the already-rich can get even richer.

Then we speak with one of the country’s leading experts on taxation who, because of his investigative journalism, has been called the nation’s de facto tax enforcer-in-chief. Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnston, the founder and editor-in-chief of DC Report.org whose latest book is “The Making of Donald Trump”, joins us to discuss how the soulless hirelings of the rich in Congress are trotting out the same tired old trickle-down lies, and the real possibility that Donald Trump could be the first American president to do a perp walk in an orange jumps suit, on his way from the oval office to a federal penitentiary.

Then finally we speak with Natalie Hernandez, a Nevada gun violence prevention organizer with Battle Born Progress, a part of a coalition of gun safety activists who successfully passed Question 1 on last November’s ballot only to have the law stymied and the will of the people trampled on by Nevada’s Attorney General Adam Laxalt. We will discuss what impact the massacre in Las Vegas on Sunday might have on finally instituting the background check law and whether Adam Laxalt will be punished in his expected race for governor in the 2018 elections.